Abstract

This study examines how internet memes in Indonesia are constructed as a new form of communication in the digital era that are used in conveying diverse perspectives and reaching crossed aspects such as politics, economics, social and cultures. Meme is a type of digital artifact that gains more popularity in Indonesia recently, and it has been used extensively in voicing social commentaries and political aspirations, which usually contains the mix of humor and satire. Following Dawkin’s (1976) assertion that the mutation, replication, and propagation of memes depended on the background of host culture (the meme creator), the study stated that although internet memes are dispersed as a form of digital artifacts, their creations are also based on to unique and distinct digital cultures, especially in Indonesia.
Following the original concept from Dawkins, a number of recent studies have used the concept of fidelity, fecundity, and longevity as a way to evaluate the successfulness of memes production as digital artifacts. The previous research clearly showed that derivation and replication are the nature of memes. Rintel (2013) further stated that imitation and replication of memes follow certain patterns which he stated as templatibility. Pattern of templatibility can consist of various structures such as image macros, snowclones. exploitable, comic rage and advice animal. Based on the corpus data of 500 Indonesian memes taken during August-October 2017, researcher used Visual Content Analysis technique to identify Indonesia’s internet memes structure.
This study found that internet memes have unwritten rules that connected each memes replications. The rules can be spelled out through structural relation that parsed meme structures and contextual relation that related each replication of one big concept. This study found three main categories of memes in Indonesia, those are macro images, collages meme, and meme kamus. Furthermore, researcher conducted in-depth interview of four meme creators in Indonesia to understand how an idea is transformed and spread on the internet. The study found that the different visual cultural backgrounds in Indonesia influence the meme creators to have their own style and successfulness indicator in the creation and dissemination of meme content. Meme in Indonesia are evolving inconsistently and more comic-like structures, or called comic memes. Social media as the most popular channel for the distribution of memes in Indonesia put the indicator of the meme’s successfulness in Indonesia. This study conducted 5 factors of the successful memes in Indonesia, they are originality, segmentation, familiarity, contextual and momentum.